Review: Freedom interrupted

The idea that truth is sometimes stranger than fiction gets no argument from Salman Rushdie.

This is a novelist whose characters fall out of airplanes and don’t die. They sprout horns and tails and halos. They subsist on nothing but butterflies.

That all happened in his 1988 book “The Satanic Verses,” and then what happened to him for writing it made his invented surrealism seem almost tame by comparison.

Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini ordered him killed for blasphemy against Islam, sending Rushdie into hiding from his London home for close to a decade. Muslims hung him in effigy and burned his book. Stores that carried it were bombed. The novel’s Japanese and Italian translators were stabbed, its Norwegian publisher shot.

As Rushdie explains in “Joseph Anton,” his terrific, deeply thoughtful memoir about that period, he became like a character in one of his own novels — exiled, caught in a culture clash between East and West, unmoored physically and emotionally.

“How easy it was to erase a man’s past and to construct a new version of him, an overwhelming version, against which it seemed impossible to fight,” he writes. What are you supposed to do when even Yusaf Islam, the former Cat Stevens, singer of “Peace Train,” wants you dead?

But fight he did. Much of the power of “Joseph Anton” comes from Rushdie’s chafing at the bit of his diminished existence — thankful that Britain’s Special Branch is on hand to protect him from assassins, but resentful about his loss of freedoms. And his loss of himself.

Rushdie had never heard the word “fatwa” until one landed on his head. Law enforcement took the threat seriously enough to give him round-the-clock guards, an approach that seemed prudent after one would-be killer blew himself up building a bomb in a hotel.

The danger meant he traveled in cars with bulletproof windows. He had to move regularly — to friends’ cottages, to bed-and-breakfasts operated by retired cops, to rented estates with gated entrances and high hedges.

He came up with his own alias — Joseph Anton, the first names of two favorite authors, Conrad and Chekhov. Much to his dismay, the guards called him Joe.

“He was aware that the splitting in him was getting worse, the divide between what ‘Rushdie’ needed to do and how ‘Salman’ wanted to live,” he writes. “He was ‘Joe’ to his protectors, an entity to be kept alive; and in his friends’ eyes, when he was able to see them, he read their alarm, their fear that ‘Salman’ might be crushed under the weight of what had happened. ‘Rushdie’ was another matter entirely. ‘Rushdie’ was a dog...’Rushdie’ was much hated and little loved. He was an effigy, an absence, something less than human.”

The use of “he” — third-person in a memoir instead of first-person — is a distancing device, entirely intentional. Rushdie said in a recent U-T San Diego email interview that he tried writing it in first-person and didn’t like it. “Felt too narcissistic,” he said.